Getting loster, faster

Scrolling around the Web the other day, I came across an Information Week story on a glitch within Google's Gmail program that had resulted in no service for those of us who use Gmail for a couple of hours during the workday on Monday.

I lead such an air age life and am so a chip-carrying member of the digerati, I had noticed this immediately on my cellphone-blackberry-bass fishing pole (and microwave, at least that's what I think the silver button on the corner below the blue tooth adapter is for)-if by immediately we can agree that I mean not at all. (I didn't know until late Tuesday that any of this had happenedl-if only someone had sent me an email! Oh waitaminit, upon further review....)

The last time I checked there are three other people on the planet with my cell phone number, and most of the time, I'm the odd guy out when it comes to remembering it. It's not unusual for me to have two of the other three in the car with me and we're going to visit the third one. On these occasions, I have been known to have both the cell phone with me and to have it on. Inexplicable when you think about, so I don't.

Here's my favorite part of the online Gmail story--you can click for a 'printable view' so you can have a paper copy. The irony of that is so deliciously thick I could cut it with my iPhone (if I had one, and knew how it worked). It's a bit like taking Edison's development of the incandescent bulb and using it to illuminate your candle factory so the night shift can see what they're making.

I've worked with people who've used their computers as word processors and as nothing else, because it never occurred to them there were even other applications. Talk about the down side of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. It just underscores how very often the difference between a rut and a grave is the depth of the habit. We have new tools and new technologies but the expansion of thinking to challenge the tools to keep up with our thinking is lacking because we, as a species, get to a certain dimension where sooner or later everything winds up on the customer's plate and then gone.
Not that I'm advancing anything anywhere-I'm engaging in a very enjoyable (for me; for you, not so much) exercise in self-aggrandizement with this blog, when I'm not sending knock-knock jokes to half of my address book. In my defense, I'd note that I'm not one of the Scammers and Spammers of Nigeria, but that is at least a more innovative application for all that we have developed (okay, that you developed; I have a doctor's note, so cut me some slack) or it was until we all got 83 kajillion emails with a variation on the same make-a-buck hustle.

Cassius and Brutus struggled with all of this when The Bard was playwrighting (perhaps the first use of this as a gerund?) for Julius Caesar, "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..." I think I have a copy of that play someplace.....
-bill kenny